Representations from the natural sciences—particularly those rooted in scientific treatises shaped by the European colonizer’s perspective—serve as a vast reservoir of images for the artist. By confronting history, racism, gender, and biology head-on, she creates a rich poetic repertoire that permeates her installations, drawings, books, and videos. The Black female body, layered with oppression across race, gender, and class, remains complex and elusive, unrepresentable through white-centric lenses. Small cocoons seem to contain a forbidden subjectivity, blending the yearnings, desires, and visions of a Black body that cleverly sidesteps Brazil’s cultural neuroses, playing with time and projecting life. Creating abstract natural forms that resemble anatomical sketches, Paulino challenges the racist history of biology.

Alongside her personal archive, Paulino has also shown a constant interest in scientific records. Whilst studying Printmaking at ECA/Universidade de São Paulo, the artist investigated animal species such as fish, bats and lizards. The beginning of the 2000s is marked by a series of drawings that evoke the realm of biology, with cells, eggs, cocoons and metamorphoses

This work was previously featured in the exhibitions:
The Time of Things, Mendes Wood DM Brussels, 2022